The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter (читаем книги .txt) 📗

The time had come to end the interview. He wasn't sure at all that the girl was employed by the D.A.M.E.S. If she was, surely they would have liaised with Waverly. On the other hand, he couldn't believe she was a Thrush member. Even the most accomplished of actresses could hardly have feigned that bland incredulity when he'd mentioned the organization and its aims. In any event, the riddle of her allegiance must wait until another time: at the moment be was tired of being questioned himself.

"...essential that you tell me your principals," Cora he Simone was saying.

Once more, Illya searched for, caught and held her eyes. "But surely you must realize, my dear..." he began.

Tensing the muscles of calf, back and thigh, he raised himself minutely from the chair and sent it rocketing backwards with a powerful thrust of his fingers.

The girl's eyes tore themselves away from his as the chair skated across the floor with a rumble and a screech. Involuntarily, she followed its path with her glance. At the same time, like a trepak dancer from the Cossack country, Kuryakin kicked out one leg horizontally from his squatting position.

The toe of his shoe caught the underneath of the gun's butt as it nestled in her hand, sending the weapon spinning upwards. Before she had switched her gaze back from the errant chair, he had risen to his feet, stretched out a hand and snatched the Berretta from the air.

"Forgive the liberty," he said quietly. "I have to leave early in the morning and I really do need some sleep."

The girl, scarlet with anger, her eyes flashing, nursed her hand and watched as he broke the automatic, slid the clip out and shook the shells into the palm of one hand. He crossed the room to the bed, picked up the white shoulder-strap bag she had left there, and dropped them inside. Then he bowed, handed her the bag and the empty gun, and turned to open the door for her. He was smiling.

"Until the next time, Miss Simone," he said gently.

"If there is one," the girl said grimly. "I do not like people opening my handbag without my permission. It's rude. Also, I have a rooted objection to being followed. So if you'll forgive me…"

She reversed the gun in her hand and slashed the butt expertly down to the side of Illya's head while he was bent over the lock.

---

He still had a headache when the plane landed at Brasilia the following morning. The weather was humid, close and fiercely hot, the sky overcast by a lowering front.

In view of O'Rourke's information, he decided to go first of all to the auto rental companies. It wasn't until the fourth attempt that he found anyone who had heard of "Mr. Williams." But the boy behind the shabby counter in this one remembered at once.

"Why goodness me, yes!" he exclaimed, his dark face lighting up at the memory. "As a matter of fact he hired the car personally from me. Nice chap, really top-hole."

"He was going up to the San Felipe dam, was he?"

"Oh rather. Absolutely. Told me so himself, don't you know. In fact be asked me to help him work out the jolly old route. He was going to spend the night at Goias, I believe."

"He didn't bring the car back himself?"

"Well, no. As a matter of fact a different bloke did. Just handed it in, paid out the cash and hooked it, you know."

"And you haven't seen Mr. Williams since?"

"Williams? No. Not a hide nor a jolly old hair. But..."

"You have seen the other man?"

"Not to say since, old bean. Before. I've seen him around. Cove by the name of Greerson. Hardly the type I'd expect your friend -"

"Does he live here?"

"Live here? Who does, old chap, who does? No, I fancy he's a backwoodsman. Tell you the truth, I rather thought he was a foreigner employed on the construction site or something of that sort."

"You've been very helpful," Illya said. "Here, take this - and I'd like to rent a car myself for a few days. Any chance at all of getting the same one Williams had?"

"Oh, I say, thanks awfully. Most decent of you… Not to say the same actual one. One just like it – another VW. But you can't very well have the actual one - the girl's already taken that."

"The girl?"

"Smashing bird, old boy. About an hour ago. Asked all the same questions you've asked - and off she drove."

Kuryakin gave an exclamation of annoyance. If the girl was Coralie Simone, it meant she had help in a big way. For she hadn't been on the first plane, he could have sworn - and that in turn meant she must have a private aircraft, for to have made Brasilia from Rio in any other way would have been impossible in the time.

"Don't you find that collar uncomfortable in this weather?" he asked sourly as they turned together to go out into the garage.

---

San Felipe do Caiapo was a collection of shacks, some wood, some adobe-and-thatch, dispersed around a rutted open space that did service as central square, market, sports ground and local park. There was an inn, a mud walled church, a swaying bridge over the river, and a garage - an open shed flanked by a single rusty gasoline pump which was surrounded by an assortment of decrepit vehicles. Without exception, these were of pre-war vintage and looked as though they had just man aged to struggle as far as San Felipe when they were new, and had never been able to raise the necessary horsepower to leave again.

Most of the population were seated outside the front doors of their houses, leaning against the walls to get the maximum amount of shade from the projecting eaves, but there were several groups of men along a boardwalk linking the building on one side of the square rather in the manner of a Hollywood western.

Illya bumped the Volkswagen across the plaza, scattering chickens, dogs and mules, and edged the car cautiously over the bridge. There was only a trickle of water in the pebbly river bed below.

Beyond the town, the road twisted through a belt of forest, breasted a rise, and dropped down to the river again, where it joined a wider, paved highway running almost due north and south. Kuryakin took the northerly direction and beaded for Getuliana. Presently the valley widened, the hills at each side became lower, and the river looped away in a series of ox-bows across an alluvial plain.

In a few miles, he caught sight of the new city. Or, rather, the place where the new city was destined to be.

The road clung to higher ground at the side of the wide valley, and the excavations - a couple of miles away in the middle of the plain - were spread out before him like a map. Hundreds of acres had been cleared, bulldozed into squares and rectangles and crescents, segmented by radial boulevards converging on a central space, laterally divided by wide avenues. But apart from the temporary huts erected by contractors, there wasn't a building in sight. A cloud of dust above the yellowish earth marked the place where a single bulldozer was working near a pair of cranes in one corner of the vast site. But the only other activity Illya could see was a mile away to the north, where the antlike movements of a fleet of trucks and several dozen men centered on a pair of heavy transport aircraft drawn up at one end of a wide landing strip.

Soon the distant puttering of the bulldozer was submerged in a heavier, deeper rumble. For a moment, he sought the source of the noise. Then his eye caught a moving dust cloud to his right. A column of trucks was winding its way along a route leading from the site to the road be was on. In a few minutes, the convoy roared past, heading for San Felipe and the damn. All the trucks were covered - and each one seemed to have a man in some sort of uniform beside the driver.